


the upper bound, the brighter world

by Chrome



Series: the brighter world [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character's Name Spelled as Viktor, Colors, DIY Home Improvement, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everything's Fine, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 01, Viktor Has Abandonment Issues, Yuuri moves to St. Petersburg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 07:57:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15262896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chrome/pseuds/Chrome
Summary: The temperatures in St. Petersburg are lowest in January, but the two weeks that Viktor spends back home at the end of December are the coldest he’s ever been in his life.Yuuri moves to St. Petersburg. Viktor cannot afford to fail.





	the upper bound, the brighter world

**Author's Note:**

> This is Team Viktuuri's Main Round One entry for Sportsfest 2018 for the theme Colors! It is written by me, catalists/Chrome, and the art is by [Coyoteclaw11](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coyoteclaw11/).
> 
> Thanks are owed to our other three team members, Sol, Claire and Bri, who picked up our slack in the bonus round and are generally amazing. I also owe thanks to the incredible [Ollie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/postingpebbles) for her wonderful beta-ing and to [Allison](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stammiviktor) for her ongoing support and ideas.

The temperatures in St. Petersburg are lowest in January, but the two weeks that Viktor spends back home at the end of December are the coldest he’s ever been in his life. The apartment feels hauntingly empty in a way that it never has before, even the previous spring when he’d started to truly stop caring. Maybe they merely matched before, the numbness inside him and the sterility of the rooms, counters wiped clean, walls in grey-blue tones. Now his heart is full to bursting with the thought of Yuuri, Yuuri who broke his record, Yuuri who gave him the gold ring on his right hand, Yuuri who is coming in two weeks, and the apartment feels utterly wrong next to the rightness of that.

He texts Yuuri a string of pictures of the place—the couch, the bookshelves, the walls of the bedroom and strings of questions to follow. How many books is he bringing and should Viktor buy more shelves, what about a rice cooker, should they share a closet, what color should the walls be? Yuuri texts back, _what’s wrong with the color now?_

_Nothing,_ Viktor types back, _if you like it. But they’re starting to peel anyway and it’s your home now too._

Yuuri had said nothing for a moment and then sent back a single heart. _Let me think about it?_

_Of course,_ Viktor replies. He’s never been so glued to his phone in his life as he is when they’re apart. When he goes to bed at ten o’clock, it’s four AM for Yuuri; he texts him ‘good morning’ every night before he falls asleep so that Yuuri wakes up to it, sends photos of Makkachin on her morning walk, looks at the rink with new eyes when he snaps a picture for Yuuri and captions it _wish you were here_ and means it more than he’s meant maybe anything else in his life.

It’s only a few days after the paint conversation that Yuuri texts, _What colors were you thinking?_

After practice that afternoon, Viktor goes to the hardware store and sends Yuuri photograph after photograph of paint swatches. All the names are in Russian and he translates them. They sound even more ridiculous in English, somehow, _pale denim_ and _blue stone_ and a _phantom blue_ that they both swear is just white.

_Maybe not blue,_ Yuuri texts after a little while. _Maybe something warmer?_

_I thought blue was your favorite._

_It is,_ Yuuri writes. There’s a moment of silence, the evidence of his texting appearing and disappearing as Yuuri decides what to say. He does this verbally sometimes, too, as he stumbles his way to what he means, but Viktor prefers that, prefers to be able to read the form of hesitation on his face, to guess where he is going by the minutiae of his gestures.

Viktor prefers to be as close to Yuuri as possible, and every distant exchange is both a salve and a new wound, a fraction of what he wants and a cutting reminder of what he’s missing.

Then Yuuri says, _But pink or red might be better here? It’s a living room so it should feel lived in?_

Viktor has just started to parse that when the phone rings.

“Hi,” Yuuri says, sounding a little breathless when Viktor picks up. Viktor feels something convulse in his chest when he hears Yuuri’s voice. It hurts but in a good way, like the burn of muscles after a routine.

“Hi,” Viktor says, and he’s sure that his smile comes through in his voice.

“Sorry, that didn’t make any sense,” Yuuri says. “It just feels more you? It’s very—I like your apartment!” he quickly backtracks, as though worried Viktor will take offense. “I really do. I’d actually, uh,” he gives a little embarrassed laugh. “I kind of already knew what it looked like before you send photos? Because you did that, that magazine—“

Viktor feels the rush of warmth as Yuuri talks, like the burn of alcohol except brighter and better. The reminder that Yuuri has loved him, loves him, it makes him feel as light-headed as if he were drinking champagne. He can get drunk off this feeling alone.

“But,” Yuuri says. “I always thought it looked a little. Cold, I guess? I do like it,” Yuuri reiterates. “It’s—it looks good. It just also looks kind of lonely.”

Viktor looks at the cool blue of the walls and closes his eyes so that he can pretend that Yuuri is there, that his voice in his ear is coming from next to him instead of a thousand miles away. Makkachin butts her head against his legs, as though she senses that he needs comfort right then, and he drops to the floor and hugs her even though the position is hell on his joints.

“Viktor?” Yuuri says, and Viktor realizes he’s been quiet for too long. “I didn’t mean—“

“You’re right,” Viktor breathes into Makkachin’s fur. “It’s lonely.”

“Something warm,” Yuuri says. “Like a light pink. Or purple, maybe. Send me pictures. We’ll choose something.” His voice has taken on a careful steadiness, the anxiousness bleeding off in the face of Viktor’s admission. “I’ll be there soon, and we can paint it together.”

That makes Viktor smile. “We can hire someone,” he says. “They’ll be faster and do a better job.”

“I’ve painted before,” Yuuri says, sounding a bit wounded. “At the onsen. We can do it.”

It’s a terrible idea, Viktor knows. It sounds messy. It will eat up time that they don’t have, as two professional athletes who will be preparing for Europeans and Four Continents, respectively. Viktor himself is easily distracted, quickly bored, and probably incredibly inept with a paint brush. He imagines himself side-by-side with Yuuri, taping the edges of the molding, spreading newspaper on the floor, Yuuri’s cheeks flecked with paint. It’s a wonderful idea.

“Okay,” Viktor says. “We’ll do it together.”

“Together,” Yuuri says, and this time it’s Viktor who can hear him smile through the phone. “Just a little longer.”

“Yes,” Viktor says. He strokes Makkachin’s ears and pictures that smile, and he knows that repainting the walls will do nothing for how this apartment feels compared to having Yuuri here beside him.

“Have you eaten yet?” Yuuri asks. “It’s seven there, isn’t it?”

“No,” Viktor says. “I will.”

“Go eat dinner,” Yuuri says. “We can talk later.”

“Are you busy?” Viktor asks, as the thing in his chest constricts around his heart.

“No,” Yuuri says, carefully.

“Stay on the phone with me?”

“Okay,” Yuuri says. “I can do that.”

He doesn’t know if it feels this way to Yuuri. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe Viktor is the pathetic clingy one, curling around Makkachin at night and wishing for Yuuri, hearing a creak of the floorboards and imagining it’s Yuuri in the next room. But even if it doesn’t, Yuuri never complains when his neediness bleeds through, when Viktor sends him text after text, when he makes Yuuri stay on the phone while he bakes chicken and asparagus and tries to feel less alone.

Viktor practices, and practices, and the way his feet become bruised and blistered is sharp and familiar. He and Yuuri talk every evening, text in between, and that ache becomes familiar, too.

Three days before Nationals, he finds it, somehow knows even before he sends a photo of the paint sample to Yuuri, carefully balanced in one hand to capture the right color in the sharp industrial light of the aisle.

_Oh, I like that one,_ Yuuri writes. _What’s it called?_

_Pale gray heliotrope,_ Viktor translates.

_That one,_ Yuuri says.

Viktor has to make two more trips to the hardware store, to buy a tape measure and measure the length of the walls, his joints protesting as he crouches, and then to buy primer and paint and carpenter’s tape, and he stacks it all in the corner of the living room like a promise.

Japanese Nationals overlaps with Russian Nationals; Minako holds Yuuri’s phone by the side of a rink in Nagoya while Viktor unlaces his own skates from practice and they talk about back-up jumps.

Viktor ends the call when Yuuri says, “I have to go,” all nerves but still reluctant.

“I’ll be watching,” Viktor promises.

“Don’t take your eyes off me,” Yuuri says, and hangs up.

He doesn’t need to say it, and surely he knows that by now. Even without the reminder, Viktor never could.

Yuuri is stunning, as always, and when Viktor switches from laptop to phone after his performance that evening the ache in his chest is wider, deeper, like something eating him alive.

“You were beautiful,” Viktor says.

“I fell on the quad flip,” Yuuri says.

“Yes,” Viktor agrees. “But you were beautiful.” And it doesn’t matter—he’s ahead of the other skaters by a mile.

“Tomorrow,” Yuuri says. “I’ll be watching you. I promise.”

Viktor closes his eyes. “I hope I don’t disappoint you, then.” He tries at lightness but doesn’t manage it.

“Never,” Yuuri says. “Nothing you do could ever disappoint me.”

Yuri ends up in first after the short program, something that seems to stun him; Viktor is in second, something that seems to stun Georgi.

“Not bad, old man,” Yuri says, grudgingly. “But I’m going to win.”

“Maybe,” Viktor says, cheerfully. “We’ll see.” He glances at Georgi, who is uncharacteristically unreadable, and wonders if he should say something, but he doesn’t have the emotional energy. It doesn’t sting, he realizes, to lose to Yuri, not in the way he’d expected. It’s frustrating in the way he remembers it used to feel, back when skating felt less like a routine and more like an adventure. He’d forgotten what it was like.

Yuuri calls when it’s over. “Are you okay?”

Viktor asks, instead, “Are you disappointed?”

“You skated beautifully,” Yuuri says. “And I already told you, you could never disappoint me.”

“Then yes, I’m okay,” Viktor says. “I really don’t mind. Is that strange?”

“Before I met you,” Yuuri says, “I think I would have thought so. But now—no, I guess it doesn’t.”

“I miss you,” Viktor says. He’s said it a thousand times over their few weeks apart, in strings of texts and photographs and quiet requests, but never using the words.

“I miss you too,” Yuuri says, and the thing in Viktor’s chest loosens, as though it’s been waiting to hear it. “Just a few more days.” He can hear Yuuri’s smile. “I’m going to bring you a gold medal.”

“I know,” Viktor says. “I bought paint.”

“What?”

“For the living room,” Viktor says. “I bought the paint we decided on.”

“Good,” Yuuri says, still faintly surprised but something bright and delighted in his voice. “I can’t wait.”

The score Yuuri gets the next afternoon would be a personal best at an international competition, and Viktor can’t stop smiling. It isn’t a surprise to Viktor, and certainly not to the world at large, but it seems to be a surprise to Yuuri, staring open-mouthed at his score.

Viktor texts, _I love you,_ without thinking about it. He gets to see Yuuri pick up his phone off the bench on camera, gets to see his expression shift, and he’s so caught up in it that he doesn’t have time to feel afraid before he gets a reply.

_I love you too._

Viktor’s still high on the adrenaline of it when he skates out onto the ice, _I love you too_ ringing in his head in Yuuri’s voice. It’s a wild impulse that makes him do a triple toe loop at the start of his program instead of his quad flip, and his heart is singing _Yuuri, Yuuri, Yuuri_ when he does it in that toe loop’s place at the end, the pure joy cutting through the burn in his muscles.

Yakov is annoyed. Yuri is reluctantly impressed. He still manages gold, but Viktor beats him in the free skate, less than a point between them in the end.

“I’ve learned a lot from Yuuri Katsuki,” Viktor tells the press serenely, and he gets a few laughs but oh, he means it.

The exhibition skate, the flight back from Moscow, all of it becomes nothing more than an anxious blur. Viktor cleans and buys groceries and moves books around and touches the paint cans every time he walks by them and can’t keep his hands off his phone. Makkachin is uneasy because Viktor is, nosing at his hand to try and make him sit down, stop moving, but he can’t. It feels like the world has gone static around him, like a planet thrown out of orbit, hurtling alone and unplanned through empty space.

Then there is the airport, and there is Yuuri, and when Viktor sees him his feet are already moving and Yuuri is running and they collide there, arms around each other. Viktor is sure this will end up on social media in seconds but he can’t bring himself to care, not when Yuuri is warm and solid in his arms and it feels like the world has snapped back into focus.

“I missed you,” Viktor says into his shoulder.

Yuuri just holds him tighter. There in Yuuri’s arms, it feels like the universe goes still around him.

“Wow,” Yuuri says, when he steps into the apartment. He’s dragging a suitcase, Viktor is dragging the other. The rest of Yuuri’s boxes will arrive tomorrow morning, but he has the important things with him, his skating gear, some of his clothes, his laptop and phone and a handheld game system with a name that escapes Viktor.

“What?” Viktor says, his heart jumping in his chest at _Yuuri, Yuuri here, Yuuri in Russia_ but still, residually, worried. Viktor is not good at building things; he has never built a home before and a part of him isn’t sure he’s capable of it.

Contrary to popular belief, Viktor can cope with failure. It’s true that he hasn’t faltered on the ice in years, true that he almost never falls on his jumps, hasn’t walked away from a competition without a medal in half a decade. But he has failed at plenty of other things and he knows how to smile through it. He remembers stammering his way through his first interviews in English, remembers winning an Olympic gold medal at seventeen less than a week after failing a chemistry test. Remembers his mother spitting _this is your fault_ when his stepfather slammed the door on the way out.

But he has never failed at something like this, something that he wants, needs like air with every fiber of his being. If he fails Yuuri, he isn’t sure he can survive it.

Yuuri is smiling at him, though, and surely this is a good sign, even rumpled from the airplane. “I can’t believe I’m here,” he says.

“Me either,” says Viktor.

“That’s not what—“ Yuuri shakes his head. “What I mean is, I would have killed to be here, not too long ago.”

Viktor blinks, and then smiles. “You wouldn’t now?”

Yuuri catches sight of the paint, then, and he bends down to examine it, picks up the tape. “You thought of everything.”

Viktor hadn’t thought of this, how it would feel to see Yuuri here, looking at the paint they’d picked together. It’s a punch to the gut and the best feeling he’s ever had. He feels breathless.

“Tomorrow,” Yuuri says, decisively. “We should do this tomorrow. After that we’ll be busy, won’t we?”

Tomorrow is Saturday, which has been their rest day for as long as Viktor can remember. He doesn’t think Yakov actually practices anymore, but it’s tradition now. “Yes,” Viktor says. “Rest day tomorrow.”

“Painting day tomorrow,” Yuuri says. “If you still want to?” He looks uncertain, somehow, which doesn’t seem right. He must know—can’t possibly not know by now—that Viktor wants whatever Yuuri wants, whatever will keep Yuuri here for as long as he possibly can.

“Of course,” Viktor says, and smiles.

They sleep in the next morning, so it’s not until eleven o’clock that they start unfolding newspaper across the hardwood, taping the edges of the molding. Yuuri seems to know what he’s doing, at least, and Viktor has googled everything, so the process is at least familiar even if he doesn’t quite trust their execution. He borrows a stepladder from the building custodian and tapes along the top edge, too, looking down at his apartment from the unfamiliar angle. Yuuri, somehow, is still familiar from above, the way his hair is mussed in the back from his own fidgeting, the way he shifts his weight.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Viktor says, when he gets down.

“Famous last words,” says Yuuri, who seems to be rethinking his insistence on DIY now that he’s seen Viktor with a paintbrush in his hand.

“Too late to back out now,” Viktor sings, and pries the primer open.

It isn’t as easy as it looks in the videos he’d found online, but it isn’t so difficult, either. After a while it even becomes tedious. He has a surprisingly large amount of wall. Yuuri is pickier than he is, and sometimes takes the brush out of his hand to smooth out a drip or get a spot that Viktor has overlooked. There is a fleck of white on his nose and Viktor wants to brush it off for an excuse to touch him but also to leave it there forever just to revel in how cute he is.

“Now we let it dry,” Yuuri says decisively. “We can do the rest after lunch.”

Viktor is grateful for the anxious grocery shopping of the previous week, because Yuuri’s eyes light up when he retrieves salmon from the fridge. They bake it with garlic and lemon and lean up against the oven while it bakes, enjoying the extra warmth and the smell that begins to fill the room.

Some people say to be careful what you wish for, that reality inevitably falls short of dreams, but for all that he’s imagined this, none of his pining comes anywhere close to the reality of this.

“What are you thinking?” Yuuri asks.

“That you’re beautiful,” Viktor says, which isn’t strictly all of it but has the added benefit of not being a lie. Yuuri flushes again and Viktor pokes the spot of paint on his nose.

“Viktor!” Yuuri says, and then his hand goes to the spot. “Do I—why didn’t you say something?”

“I just did,” says Viktor, and laughs and takes the salmon out while Yuuri disappears to the bathroom to wash his face.

The next hour finds them back in the living room, opening up the cans of lavender paint. Yuuri makes a little noise in his throat when they get the first one open and he can see the color inside for the first time.

“Do you like it?” Viktor asks, suddenly uncertain.

“Yes,” Yuuri says. “It just—it actually made me think it looks like, for my exhibition, like our costumes together.”

Now that Yuuri has said it, Viktor can’t see anything else. He feels like singing. “Yuuri,” he says, voice soft with awe. “It’s beautiful.”

“Help me paint, then,” Yuuri says, and holds out the brush.

The primer had the benefit of being thicker—the color is drippier, and by the time they’ve gotten halfway around the newspapers are splattered with paint.  So is the ladder, and a little bit of them, the paint trickling down the end of the brush onto their hands, staining Viktor’s fingertips, getting under Yuuri’s nails. They eventually give into it to get the job done, until finally the whole room is pale purple around them.

“It was peeling a little,” Yuuri remarks. “But I think we’ll get just as long out of this one, so—maybe five years, we can redo it or pick a new color.”

_Maybe five years,_ Viktor hears, and _we,_ and all of a sudden the empty terrible _wanting_ in his chest is back, sharp and yearning. He has spent the past weeks thinking how badly he wants Yuuri here, how empty it feels to have him missing now that he knows what life is like with him, and just then he understands that this will never stop, that he will want Yuuri here for the rest of his life.

Without his permission, his eyes start to well up.

“I do like the purple a lot, though,” Yuuri muses, and then turns around and sees him, sees the tears dripping down his face.  “Viktor?” He closes the distance between them to get a closer look, concern etched across his expression. “What’s wrong?”

The answer is nothing, nothing yet, not until someday when Yuuri leaves, and Viktor knows that could be a long time but now that he’s started, he somehow can’t stop. “Sorry,” Viktor says, half-choked.

Yuuri reaches up to try to wipe away his tears and replaces the water with a smear of lilac paint. He jerks his hand back. “Sorry!”

Viktor can’t help but laugh wetly at the stricken expression on his face. “It’s okay.”

Yuuri looks frustrated. “How do I keep making you cry?”

“It’s not you,” Viktor assures him. “This time, it’s not you. It’s me.”

“It’s not you, it’s me,” Yuuri parrots in an annoyed tone, and it’s only then that Viktor realizes what he’s said. “What is it, then?”

“I think I’ve forgotten how to live without you,” Viktor admits. He swipes at his own face and his hand comes away smeared with paint. “I’m sorry.”

Yuuri just looks at him. “It’s okay,” he says, and then he’s cupping Viktor’s face with his hand even though there’s still paint on it. His other arm curls around the back of Viktor’s neck and pulls him close. “Viktor, it’s okay, you don’t have to.”

“I mean,” Viktor says, and he takes a breath and he’s got it under control again. He hadn’t cried in years before he met Yuuri. He knows that skaters are meant to have glass hearts—he’s watched all his rinkmates and most of his competitors burst into tears at one point or another over the years, Yuri in anger or after a performance, Georgi over his girlfriends. Yuuri, of course, has cried before or during or after most of his competitions. Viktor doesn’t think he’s ever cried on camera, reserving his tears for the privacy of his own apartment or at least a locker room even when he was young enough that not even the media would have said a word.

But of course, the answer to why is _Yuuri,_ Yuuri who has somehow reached inside him and found pieces of Viktor that he’d thought were gone and dead years ago.

Including, apparently, the part that wants to cry when it realizes just how much he has to lose.

“I mean,” Viktor says, “Not just for now, I don’t think. For forever.”

“For forever,” Yuuri says. “I meant that, too.”

“Oh,” Viktor says, and the way Yuuri says it, the way Yuuri looks at him, all open warmth—he feels silly for doubting it. “I want—“ And he doesn’t know quite how to say it anymore, he realizes.

“I know,” Yuuri says. “Me too.” He leans in and kisses him, almost shy at first, and then Viktor makes a soft sound into his mouth and suddenly they’re pressed together, Yuuri’s hand fisting in Viktor’s hair, Viktor’s fingers fitting themselves around the back of Yuuri’s neck.

When Yuuri pulls back, Viktor laughs; his handprint is in lilac on Yuuri’s skin, and he can feel the dampness of Yuuri’s fingerprints along his cheek and in his hair. Yuuri looks faintly abashed as he realizes.

“We should shower,” Yuuri says, flushing, then laughing.

“Wait,” Viktor says, and he wipes his hand off on the newspaper as best he can and then picks up the phone between thumb and forefinger. “Here.”

“No!” Yuuri says, aghast. “Everyone will—“ _know,_ Viktor is sure the sentence finishes, or _be able to tell what we were doing,_ and Viktor is sure they will, the way they’ve left their handprints on each other. Then he sees something darken in Yuuri’s gaze and sees a flash of the Yuuri who says _don’t take your eyes off of me,_ who skates Eros, who wanted to show all of Russia who Viktor belonged to.

“Everyone will,” Viktor agrees.

“Okay,” Yuuri says, and he tips his head onto Viktor’s shoulder and his smile in the photo that Viktor eventually posts on Instagram is simultaneously bright as the sun and terribly smug. He’s looking right at the camera, which makes for one of them, because Viktor is looking at Yuuri.

Before then, though, Viktor sets the phone carefully back on the table and they shower. Yuuri’s fingers carefully work the paint out of Viktor’s hair while Viktor wipes the streaks of heliotrope off of Yuuri’s neck and then lets his fingers trail down his back, along his spine. Yuuri shudders and leans into him and their hands stay on each other long after the paint is gone.

Afterwards, Yuuri cleans the paint brushes while Viktor carries the newspapers out to the trash. It’s turned late afternoon and Viktor leans against the counter as he watches Yuuri lean over the sink in the early-fading winter sun. He wants to throw open the windows and shout into the street that Yuuri is his, his, that he somehow gets to keep this. He wants to call his mother and tell her that she was wrong about him, that maybe he is not so impossible to love.

He settles for posting on Instagram. As a caption, he types, _Things have gotten brighter around here._ Before he hits share, he tilts the phone towards Yuuri. “I’m posting this, okay?”

Yuuri looks at the image for a long moment, and then up at Viktor, startled.

“Oh,” he says. “You really love me, don’t you?” And he says it with such wonder in his voice that even the edge of disbelief doesn’t sting at all.

“I really do,” Viktor says.

“Yes,” Yuuri says. “It’s okay.” He’s gone a little pink again, and he says. “It’s silly, but—I sort of want to tell everyone, you know? That you’re mine.”

Viktor smiles. “I know exactly what you mean.”

**Author's Note:**

> !!SportsFest Participants!! Please leave your comments on Dreamwidth to receive points for the comments round! 
> 
> I'm [catalists](http://catalists.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr.
> 
> Please leave a comment if you can! They mean a lot.
> 
> Images used: Makkachin ([Pexels](http://www.pexels.com/photo/adorable-animal-breed-canine-264206/)) | Living Room ([Pexels](http://www.pexels.com/photo/apartment-architecture-armchair-bed-271739/)) | Paint Swatch ([gazeronly](http://www.flickr.com/photos/gazeronly/14798999267))  
> Generators used: [Iphone Text](http://ios.foxsash.com/) | [Instagram Post](http://zeoob.com/generate-instagram-post/)


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